At Harvard, free from the constraints of Washington society, Gore went into a chrysalis of sorts. He took up marijuana (and, according to some accounts, LSD), grew his hair long, engaged in binge drinking contests, and wrote a lot of poetry. Politics seemed to have no place in his life: he left the freshman council after a semester, and was content with becoming a writer.

However, after taking a seminar taught by Erik Erikson, Gore decided that he wasn't made to be a writer. He stopped working on his great novel (which would have been about Carthage), and took a goverment class under Richard Neustadt, after which he finally concluded that he would follow his father's footsteps into public life.

Gore entered law school at Vanderbilt University and took up a job with the Nashville Tennesseean. But when the representative from his father's old district suddenly resigned in 1976, the younger Al was persuaded to run. He was 28 years old, incredibly shy, and a horrible speaker, but by sheer joss, coupled with financial help from some oil companies run by his family, Gore was able to win the election.

Incidentally, there was a certain fellow in Arkansas who lost that year's Congressional election.

Anyway, Gore's political career had officially been launched, and the Tennesseeans took a liking to him. He was a very organized and hard-working politician who would hold scores of town meetings with his constituents over the weekends. His journalism skills became useful when he joined the Oversight and Investigations Committee, and he eventually became a loud voice in the Capitol in favor of arms control, a hot topic in the late 70's and early 80's.

In 1983, Tennessee senator Howard Baker announced that he would not run for re-election. Gore found out through his former editor, one John Siegenthaler, and mounted a successful election bid in 1984. Now Gore was officially a member of the illustrious United States Senate, and overconfidence began to set in, which culminated in his disastrous presidential bid in 1988, in which he publicly admitted to smoking pot.

Come 2000, things were different. Gore was now running against George W. Bush, and they were similar in many ways. Both Bush and Gore were born into political families. Both had problems with public speaking. Both had controversial running mates. Both had funny accents. Indeed, Bush and Gore were so fundamentally similar to the public that the public never even really decided who should become President: it took months to figure out who had won the election. But Gore, a vanilla candidate, eventually lost to the friendlier (if dumber) Bush, when the United States Supreme Court finally approved Florida's recount in Bush v. Gore.

Gore moved to New York City and gained a lot of weight and grew a beard. He became a professor of journalism at Columbia University for a short time, doing what he should have been doing his whole life. While it was rumored that Gore would face Bush for a rematch in 2004, he has decided not to throw himself back into the arena just yet.

Good for Gore.

(Although I gotta say, ever since he started hanging out with Howard Dean, he's gone completely apeshit.)